The new biopic A Complete Unknown follows a young Bob Dylan as he arrives in New York and changes American folk music forever. Edward Norton plays folk icon Pete Seeger, who had a big impact on Dylan. Seeger was famous for his songs about working people, unions, and social justice. We're revisiting Terry's 1984 interview with Seeger, as well as her 2016 interview with Bruce Springsteen, who was compared to Dylan when he broke onto the scene.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What influence did Pete Seeger have on Bob Dylan?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Merry Christmas. I hope you're enjoying the holiday. The new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, opened today in theaters. It stars Timothee Chalamet as Dylan. Today we're featuring interviews from our archive related to Dylan. We'll start with folk singer Pete Seeger, who influenced Dylan and is portrayed in the film by Edward Norton.
and later will feature an interview with Bruce Springsteen, who described Dylan as the father of my country and inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Pete Seeger was famous for his songs about working people, unions, and social justice. He was one of the most important figures in 20th century American folk music and was at the forefront of the folk music revival in the 1950s.
He popularized the songs This Land is Your Land and We Shall Overcome and wrote If I Had a Hammer and Turn, Turn, Turn. In the 1940s, he sang union songs with the Almanac singers. A few years later, he co-founded the Weavers, who surprised everyone, including themselves, when they became the first group to bring folk music to the pop charts, until they were blacklisted.
Seeger refused to answer questions about his politics and personal associations when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s during the committee's investigation into so-called subversive activities in the entertainment field. When the committee asked about a song, Seeger offered to sing it. Permission was denied.
In 1961, he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about his politics and about other people's politics. Permission to sing the song was denied again at his trial. There's a scene based on that in the new movie.
Your Honor, you may know a friend of mine, Woody Guthrie. Great songwriter and a great American, and Woody's not well. But he's been much on my mind as I've been going through this because Woody once said that a good song can only do good. And the song I'm in hot water for here, it's a good song. It's a patriotic song, in fact.
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Chapter 2: How did Seeger respond to political questioning in the 1950s?
And I thought maybe you'd like to actually hear the words and I can play it for you.
And you won't know. You're not doing that again.
Pete Seeger was convicted for contempt of Congress, but that was eventually overturned on appeal. He later performed at President Obama's inaugural concert. As a young man, Seeger believed songs were a way of binding people to a cause. Here's one of his many labor songs, called Cotton Mill Colic.
When you go to work, well, you work like the devil. At the end of the week, you're not on the level. Payday comes, you ain't got a penny. Because when you pay your bills, you got so many. I'm going to starve and everybody will. Because you can't make a living in a cotton mill. When you buy clothes on easy term, collect to treat you like a measly worm.
One dollar down and then Lord knows if you can't make a payment they take your clothes. I'm gonna starve and everybody will cause you can't make a living in a cotton mill.
Pete Seeger kept singing and protesting right through 2011 when he joined a march in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests. He also spent many years championing environmental causes. He died in 2014 at the age of 94. When I spoke with Seeger in 1984, he told me about how much he was influenced by Woody Guthrie.
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Chapter 3: What were the key themes in Seeger's songs?
Woody showed me how to hitchhike and how to ride freight trains, how to sing in saloons. I said, what kind of songs did you sing? Well, he said, this year, here's five or six tunes that are nearly always worth a nickel or a quarter. Makes no difference now what kind of life fate hands me. I'll get along without you now. That's plain to see. It's a Gene Autry hit. Was in 1940.
Was it hard to learn how to jump a railroad car?
No. For a man, of course, for a woman it would be much more difficult. The danger of being assaulted by men who assume that any woman who would travel that way is open to his advances. Woody said, you wait in the outskirts of town, and when the train is picking up speed, it's still not going too fast. You can grab a hold of it and swing on.
Getting off the first time, I didn't know how to do it, and I fell down and skinned my knees and elbow and broke my banjo. Fortunately, I had a camera with me, and I hocked it in a local pawn shop and bought a very cheap guitar. I knew a few chords, and I got through the rest of the summer playing the guitar. Woody was a direct actionist.
When he was singing once to raise money for war bonds during World War II, he and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee were in Baltimore. And they said, Mr. Guthrie, we have a seat for you at the table and your friends, we have some food for them in the kitchen. He said, what do you mean?
He tipped the whole table up in a big crowded dining hall, dumped a whole table full of plates and everything on the floor and tipped another table up. Finally, he was restrained. And Brownie says, Woody, you're going to get us all in trouble. I'm lame and Sonny's blind. And they let him out. He was absolutely furious. That was Woody Guthrie.
You started doing a lot of performing for unions and union halls and even on picket lines. How did you all come up with the songs that you thought would really speak to the people who were there?
Well, long discussion. When I met Lee Hayes, I met one of the few geniuses I've met in my life. We were always talking and thinking what kind of songs were needed. We'd be trying out this and trying out that. Sometimes one person would start a song and another person would finish it. That's how it was with the song Talking Union. We'd heard Woody singing, you know, the old talking blues.
If you want to go to heaven, let me tell you what to do. Got to grease your feet with a little mutton stew. Slide out of the devil's hand. Ooze over in the promised land. Take it easy. Go greasy. Go greasy. So on. And I don't know whether it was Lee or Mill or me who thought of, you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do. Got to talk to the workers in the shop with you.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the Peekskill concert incident?
I thought the blacklisters would be after us a lot sooner. It took them a couple years to chop us down. And it was a full five years before they got around to calling me up before the Committee on Un-American Activities. I was surprised it took so long.
You wanted to sing a song to the committee, right?
I think I did. They questioned me about a song. I said, oh, that's a good song. I'll sing it to you. Oh, no. They didn't want me to sing it. They wanted to know where I had sung it at the following place. I said, well, I have a right to sing a song anywhere I want to, whether I agree with the people or don't agree with them. I'm not interested in telling you that.
They said, we direct you to tell us. No. He said, you are liable to be under contempt of Congress. Do you use the Fifth Amendment as your defense? No, I said, I just don't think these are questions any American should be asked, especially under threat of reprisal if they give the wrong answer. So in effect, I was defending myself on the basis of the First Amendment.
The Fifth Amendment, in effect, says you have no right to ask me this question. But the First Amendment, in effect, says you have no right to ask any American such questions.
I'm speaking with Pete Seeger, if you're just joining us. Have the wounds ever healed among the folk musicians who were friendly witnesses and those who weren't before you act?
I think it's been harder for the friendly witnesses. History has not been kind to the Un-American Activities Committee. It feels, as I felt, that these people didn't love America so much as their own particular version of America, which was somewhat limited, shall we say. And so those who cooperated with the committee, I wish they could forget it all.
Those who stood up to the committee, as Lee says, if it wasn't for the honor, he'd just as soon not been blacklisted. It was an honor.
Well, that honor kept you off of television for many years afterwards. How did you feel around the early 60s when the folk music boom started taking off, when finally folk music had become commercially viable? And you were, in a way, prevented from participating in it because you weren't allowed on radio or TV.
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Chapter 5: How did Bruce Springsteen describe Bob Dylan's impact?
And I'm wondering if you thought about, during that period when you were very depressed, how many people in the world really wanted to be you? Doesn't count for that much at the time.
Yeah, right.
But people see you on stage and, yeah, I'd want to be that guy. I want to be that guy myself very often. I have plenty of days where I go, man, I wish I could be that guy. And, you know, it's not quite, there's a big difference between what you see on stage and then my general daily, my daily existence.
You write about, I'm sorry?
No, I'm talking to myself.
Oh, okay.
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Chapter 6: What themes does Springsteen explore in his memoir?
Don't let that bother you. It's part of my illness. I do it all the time.
You write about how being on stage is almost like medicine for you. Sure. Does it get you out of yourself?
Oh, of course. You're immediately pulled out of the inside of your head, and it immediately changes your frame of mind. I've never been on stage where I've... That's not true. I have been on stage on a few occasions where I felt I couldn't escape the interior of my interior thoughts. But Peter Wolfe once said, what's the strangest thing you can do on stage? Think about what you're doing.
There's just nothing weirder you can do. If you're up there thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there, and it's not going to happen. So trying to learn how to overcome those, which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious.
So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open, and you jump in and join all those people that are out there, enjoying what you're doing together.
During the Depression, there was a period of a year and a half when you weren't on the road. You were home with one of your sons, I guess with your youngest. Did that contribute to the Depression because you couldn't be on stage and you couldn't have that kind of cathartic experience?
Yeah, I tend to be not in my own best company. I can get a little lost if I don't have my work to occasionally focus me. But at the same time, you've got to be able to figure that out. The year and a half I was home, my son was in his last year of high school, and it was kind of my last opportunity to be here with him in the house, and I wanted to get that right.
As you mentioned in your book, you wanted to write songs that you wouldn't outgrow, that you could sing as an adult, that weren't just kids' songs, and done, accomplished. But when you sing some of your early songs now, as you still do, like Born to Run, does the song have a different meaning to you than it did when you first started performing it?
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Chapter 7: What is the essence of Springsteen's music and storytelling?
We just had a series of concerts where the show was very interesting because we'd start out with my earliest material, and we played about... half a record off of our first record, and then half or three quarters off of the second record. So it was going back to my earliest music and re-singing my earliest songs that I wrote when I was 22. And it was funny that they just fit perfectly well.
They sort of gather the years up as time passes, and you can revisit The wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose, so it's quite a nice experience.
The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on... subtly different meanings, take on a little more meaning, I find.
What's an example of a song that's taken on a different meaning or more meaning for you?
A lot of the ones that are people's favorites, Born to Run, that expands every time we go out. It just seems to The memory of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful to see people that intensely singing your song.
As someone who grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Philadelphia, I love that you've continued to live in New Jersey, not only in New Jersey, but not far from where you grew up. Why have you stayed close to the home that your father left? It's ironic, yeah.
I just felt very comfortable here, and I was uncomfortable with city life. I was more or less a kid that came out of a small town, and I was a beach bum and loved the ocean and loved the sun. I liked the people that were here. I liked who I was when I was here. I wanted to continue writing about the things that I felt were important, and those things were pretty much here.
I felt like a lot of my... heroes from the past lost themselves in different ways once they had a certain amount of success. And I was nervous about that, and I wanted to remain grounded. And living in this part of New Jersey was something that was essential to who I was and continues to this day to be that way.
Bruce Springsteen, I can't thank you enough for inviting us into your studio and allowing us to do this interview. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.
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